Product Specifications

Product Line(s)

Catalyst 5000 Family Fast Ethernet switching modules support the Cisco Fast EtherChannel® switching technology, which provides bandwidth aggregation in multiples of 200 Mbps. For example, network managers can deploy Fast EtherChannel technology consisting of pairs of full-duplex Fast Ethernet ports to provide more than 400 Mbps between the wiring closet and the data center and up to 800 Mbps between servers and the network backbone in the data center for scalable, incremental bandwidth.

The unique Fast EtherChannel technology provides both true load balancing and failure recovery necessary for mission-critical applications. Unicast, broadcast, and multicast traffic are evenly distributed across the Fast EtherChannel links, providing high performance and redundant parallel paths. In the event of a link failure, Fast EtherChannel technology provides automatic recovery by redistributing loads across the remaining links without user intervention. The failure recovery time is subsecond, so no sessions or applications are dropped. Fast EtherChannel technology does not require the use of 802.1D Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP) to maintain topology state within the channel; rather it uses a Cisco value-added, peer-to-peer control protocol that provides autoconfiguration and subsecond, convergence times for parallel links, yet allows higher-level protocols such as the Spanning-Tree Protocol or existing routing protocols to maintain topology. This approach allows Fast EtherChannel technology to leverage the recovery features of the network without adding complexity or creating incompatibilities with third-party equipment or software. Since the STP operation is completely standards based, network managers can leverage their existing network topologies, augmenting bandwidth by installing Fast EtherChannel technology where single Fast Ethernet links were previously installed. See Table 1 for modules supporting this feature.